A Very Private Plot (17 page)

Blackford stopped for a moment before starting the motor in his car. He posed to himself an interesting, anfractuous question. After giving it some thought, he concluded that in all probability if he, Blackford, were Casey, and Casey were Blackford, and Casey had held out on Blackford as he, Blackford, had held out on Casey—he, Blackford, would almost certainly fire him, Casey! He was invigorated and amused by the sternness of his judgment at his own expense. It was as if he had suitably punished himself for his insubordinate independence. He drove off from the Agency, after an hour with his deputy, with a conscience considerably eased.

In fact, Blackford Oakes need not have worried. When first advised about Cyclops, just over one year before, the President had taken confident advantage of the loophole: He, the President, had never given his word to Cyclops that he would consult no one about the secret tie. That evening he had laid out the whole situation to Casey, who agreed that it was not the business of the United States to interfere. And they both agreed to spare Oakes the embarrassment of knowing that his own pledge to Cyclops had not been sustained. At Reykjavik, before they parted, the President had drawn Casey to one side. “Been thinking. It's time to call off Blackford Oakes's Moscow people, you agree?”

Casey had nodded, resignedly.

He met “Jerry,” his “son,” as arranged, in the Pan American waiting room at Dulles Airport. Serge Windels was a cheerful twenty-eight-year-old, blue-eyed and freckled, tall, but not basketball-player tall, with abundant hair that was once red, now a rusty blond, usually straying over half his forehead, some of it reaching to his horn-rimmed glasses. Half the time Serge looked over the glasses, half the time through them.

“Why don't you get those half-moon glasses, if you don't need them for distance?” Sally had once asked Serge at a picnic at the farm.

“Don't know, Sally, I guess it's a good idea. On the other hand, by the time I get around to getting new glasses, I'll probably have lost my distance vision.” Sally smiled and said later to Blackford that Serge was the most wholesome thing in the entire Agency, as far as she was concerned.

“I'm pretty wholesome, no?” Blackford said.

“No. You're not wholesome Any more than Rudolph Valentino was wholesome, or Clark Gable, or Cary Grant. You are still beautiful, exotic Blacky.”

“Well, okay. I'll give up my wholesomeness for that. It is funny, though. Serge, I mean. He strikes everybody that way, Andy Hardy.”

“Like Tom Cruise or Tom Hanks, you mean. You're dating yourself.”

“Tom Hanks? Who is he? Lincoln's nephew?”

Sally's look said, Forget it; eloquently, dispositively.

“You wouldn't know he left the Ukraine at age fourteen.”

“Fourteen? I thought he was a baby. What happened to his accent?”

“Our wholesome little boy has no accent. And when he speaks Russian it's the same thing—he has no trace of a graduate of the University of Iowa.”

“Does he also kill people? I mean, wholesomely?”

Hers was a thirty-five-year-old act—it had become something of an act, Blackford thought, though for many years it was far from that. In fact, Blackford's occupation as an agent of the CIA had been primarily responsible for the long delay in their marriage. When in those days she had referred to Blackford's covert activities, the exact nature of which she usually knew nothing about, it was with the high seriousness of the Vassar branch of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, to which Professor Sally Partridge had belonged for years. She was coming close to endorsing a statement advocating unilateral nuclear disarmament when Blackford actually sat her down, went to the telephone, called Edward Teller at the hotel suite where he had just left him, pleaded with him to come to the country for lunch the next day, made Sally promise that she would listen for one hour to Teller's analysis of the consequence of unilateral disarmament, and then made himself scarce. The lunch had been a quite unpredictable success, in part because Teller had lost none of the Hungarian polish which even his devoutest enemies conceded was utterly seductive.

But what had done it for Sally was Teller's total analytical seriousness. She had rather hoped that he would be condescending to her, a mere Doctor of Letters, author of two books on Jane Austen, and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Mexico. That would have encouraged her defiance. It was not so at all. He dealt with her as he might have dealt with Oppenheimer, or Leo Szilard, or—“God, Blacky, he sometimes made me feel I was Einstein, asking my judgment on this point or that one.”

So she gave up on unilateral nuclear disarmament, but stuck to a sane nuclear policy, provoking Blackford into asking whether he was supposed to deduce that he, Blackford, advocated an insane nuclear policy?

The moment he spoke the word he regretted it. Because, of course, she replied, “Exactly.”

Harry and Jerry Singleton sat side by side on the flight to Frankfurt. Harry let down the tray from the back of the seat in front of him. “Let's check out our papers.” He pulled out the passport from the floppy plastic case in his pocket. He was the senior Singleton, born on December 7, 1925, in Akron, Ohio. His permanent address was 3025 P Street, N.W., Washington. The inside of the passport showed that he had traveled around South America on what must have been a cruise, since the dates of the customs stamps—Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Fort Lauderdale—were two or three days apart. The passport indicated one trip to London and one to Paris and Geneva, returning three weeks later to Washington.

He handed the passport over, inviting Jerry to scrutinize it. In turn he opened Jerry's. Jerry was born on September 28, 1958, in New York. He had traveled about more than his father, with a trip to some part of Europe every year or two beginning at about college age—his passport was almost ten years old. Jerry's permanent address was in Chevy Chase, Maryland: 28 Quincy Street, another CIA safehouse.

“Are you going to tell me what this is all about—Dad?”

Blackford leaned back in his seat, letting it recline slightly. He thought back on the briefings he had received from Rufus in his long career, how exemplary they were in clarity and purpose, how fastidiously the risks were defined. Blackford's problem was delicate here because he could not give Serge a briefing that revealed the principal objective of the trip. Serge (who had pursued native Russian in college) was along to translate and to perform errands, vital and trivial.

But some background was needed, and Blackford began to speak. Quietly. Serge had to lean over toward him. He raised his glass of beer to his lips for an occasional sip. He asked a few questions. Blackford was able to answer most of them.

Their apparent objective in Moscow was to visit that city, where neither of them, their passports indicated, had been, and to make one final effort to establish whether Jerry's aunt, Harry Singleton's sister-in-law, was alive or dead. Neither father nor son had ever laid eyes on her. Harry had pledged to his dying wife, Natasha, Jerry's mother, that he would make a diligent effort to find her. Natasha Singleton had all along assumed that her Ukrainian-born sister Avrani had died during the war—until only a few months before, in June, when on her deathbed the letter had reached her from an old family friend telling her that he had reason to believe Avrani was alive and living in Moscow.

“You got the letter?”

Blackford pulled it out of the passport case. Serge read it carefully. “It's good. Got a couple of expressions you'd expect to run into from a Muscovite in his seventies. What about the return address?”

“It's there. But, unfortunately, soon after writing the letter the old family friend passed away.” He picked out a frayed air mail envelope marked, in Russian,
RETURN TO SENDER ADDRESSEE DECEASED
.

Serge murmured his admiration for the skills of the CIA's technical resources department. And then, “So. We're in Moscow on a benevolent family mission. And we pay a visit or two to the museums, that kind of thing. What then?”

“That depends. I have to find somebody, and you have to help me do that because my trail is very cold. That's how the man I'm looking for wanted it. But he also wanted me to be able to get to him in an emergency.”

“You're supposed to operate through a third person?”

“I'm supposed to find out from a third person what I'm supposed to do.”

“Do you know where Mr. Third Person hides out? Is he also related to me?”

“It involves putting up a notice in the Cheryomushki post office and waiting until something happens.”

“Who is the notice addressed to?”

“To your aunt Avrani.”

CHAPTER 21

SEPTEMBER 1986

One week before the Bolshoi Ballet opening, Vitaly and Mariya Primakov signed on for the evening shift at the post office, a shift that ran from four in the afternoon until midnight. Such were their instructions from Nikolai, and they were not hard to implement—there was always a shortage of night workers to sort the mail. If when the cards were drawn to single out the assassin the jack of spades was dealt to either of the two, it would be as simple as that he/she, the designated assassin, would not show up for work that day.

Pavel Pogodin's assistance was of course critical. During the final days before the event he would cannibalize an appropriate police uniform and the accompanying accoutrements. He had already, weeks before, got hold of a police badge and the papers of a defunct colleague—nothing that could withstand intensive scrutiny, but good enough to pass routine inspection while approaching the cordons leading to the Bolshoi Theatre. And, the day before the event, he was given the special identifying pin to be worn the next day. The design of it in hand, it was not difficult to produce a facsimile in his workshop. An entire day was set aside during which Pavel would instruct the chosen Narodnik on what might be expected of a policeman ordered to auxiliary crowd-control duty designed to provide supplementary protection for the General Secretary.

Nikolai would spend a diligent day at the offices of the MEIE reviewing blueprints for electrical systems planned for over fifty buildings in the quarter to which he had been assigned, on Ogarova Street, not far from the Bolshoi Theatre. On D-Day Nikolai would detain a subordinate draftsman after hours to amend a blueprint scheduled to be put to use in the immediate future. This practice was not unusual, especially among the young engineers seeking to make an impression on their superiors. He and the assistant would do their work in the main drafting room, where as often as not other engineers were working late. They would not leave the building until sometime after 8 p.m. No one would ever be able to say that Nikolai Trimov had been anywhere near the scene on October 2. Of course, if Nikolai himself drew the black jack, he would simply desert his station.

The day had arrived for the drawing. The six young Narodniki met again at the abandoned stable at Okateyvsky. The ugly wet-cold weather comported with the heavy mood of a band of brothers met to decide which one of them would be dead four days hence. The plan had been rehearsed in minute detail. No concertmaster put any string section through its paces more insistently than Nikolai had done, detailing contingency after contingency, elaborating what was to be done in each case. It remained entirely possible that Gorbachev would this time swerve to the right to greet his crowd, not to the left, in which case the operation would abort. And it was of course not only possible but perhaps even probable—who knows, Gorbachev might have been severely reprimanded by his closest associates for what he had done the year before—that Gorbachev would walk directly up the red carpet to the entrance hall; in which case, once again, the operation would abort.

On the other hand, Gorbachev might just reenact last year's walk to the left, to cuddle with the crowd. At the summit conference in Geneva, the television showed, he had twice abandoned his car to make company with the cosmopolitan crowd.

They sat in the same rough circle as when the plan had first been discussed two weeks ago. The wind outside was shrill. Nikolai drew from his army sack a pack of playing cards.

That was the signal for Andrei. He cleared his throat and stood up, leaning back against an old wooden stanchion. “Nikolai,” Andrei cleared his throat once again, “on behalf of my companions, I am to—I have to—I am directed to report to you the resolution that we have made.”

Nikolai looked up with alarm. He had not authorized any meeting by his five associates. No meeting by more than two of them at one time was authorized by the rules he had carefully laid down. What did Andrei have to say?

But Andrei had fallen silent, so that it was Nikolai who finally spoke.

“What is it, Andrei?”

“It is this,” Andrei blurted it out: “We have decided that you are not to deal yourself a card. If you go, our Narodniki will fall apart. You are, in our judgment, indispensable as a leader.”

Nikolai was stunned. The very idea of a self-serving discrimination seemed to infect the purity of the Narodniki, among whom no one was spared, no preferments tolerated. He could not entirely suppress a biological and spiritual jolt at the fleeting thought that he might at once see his mission through and live to spend a lifetime with Tatyana. But the clarity of the ruling idea, the compelling feel of total collegiality, instantly suppressed all other thought.

“It is out of the question, Andrei. We will proceed.”

Andrei said, “We feared that might be your reaction. Here is ours.”

He turned his head, looking over the circle of his confederates. They all stood up. “If you don't agree, we will leave right now and disband the Narodniki.”

Nikolai was silent. Slowly, tears came to his eyes, tears of frustration, of awe, of uncomplicated love and gratitude. He was forced to acknowledge his own singularity.